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Daily life is different when you're tracking glucose. A little over a year ago, I was on my way to a conference. My bags were packed, the Uber was on its way, but there was one last thing to do before I could head to the airport. Tearing open a small isopropyl alcohol wipe, I […]

Producer Manolo Morales shares a story with co-host Kelly McEvers, about a legendary place in the backyard of our Canadian northern neighbors. 

Plus, we want to hear from you. Tell us about the wonders in your backyard. Is there a strange, unusual or surprising place in your city or town? What makes this place special to you? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Our mailbox will cut you off after three minutes so please call in if you get disconnected. Or you can record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com

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Kottke:

This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit.

Follow NASA on Flickr for more.

Update: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone wallpapers from Artemis II photos, along with links to other collections, like Basic Apple Guy’s. Also, The Iconfactory has added a bunch of these images to their wonderful Wallaroo app (which is how I’ve switched to one on my own iPhone).

Update 2: Nils Streedain has made wallpapers for the Mac optimized for OLED displays (HEIC native format, pure #000 black background, etc.). Gorgeous.

Link: kottke.org/26/04/solar-eclipse-far-side-of-the-moon

Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying.

I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S.

Link: x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2041618671236469200?s=20

OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog: Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for publ...

GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks Chinese AI lab Z.ai's latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster - the same size as their previous GLM-5 release, and sharing the same paper. It's available via OpenRouter so I asked it to draw me ...

Anthropic didn't release their latest model, Claude Mythos (system card PDF), today. They have instead made it available to a very restricted set of preview partners under their newly announced Project Glasswing. The model is a general purpose model, similar to Claude Opus 4...

Holy HDR

A guide to which Apple chargers to use with which Apple products in order to charge the quickest. (Your charger’s wattage really matters when the device’s battery level is 0-50%. After that, less so.)

Om Malik: “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, ...

Live data with major airport delay times for North America. Available on the web — with a nice “TV Mode” too — and, of course, within the app.

Link: flighty.com/airports

Just lovely data visualization work from Sheets.works — a consulting firm that specializes in, I swear, Google Sheets.

Link: sheets.works/data-viz/every-iphone

This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit. Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. Thanks to KDO reader Scott for pointing me to NASA’s Flickr account, which is possibly the easiest way to look at photos taken by the Artemis II mission. Like this one: And this one — then maybe I’ll stop (maybe): Tags: artemis · astronomy · Moon · NASA · photography

I missed that author Tracy Kidder died a few weeks ago. Kidder wrote the excellent The Soul of a New Machine, which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Hollywood, Ending is John Green’s forthcoming book, “a deeply observed novel about the tension between a public and a private life, and finding your safe someone to hold onto”.

In a period of four years, Belgian photographer Barbara Iweins took a photo of every single thing in her house, “from my daughters torn sock to my sons Lego, but also my vibrator, my anxiolytics… absolutely everything. 12,795 photos of 12,795 objects.” You can explore the entire archive here, indexed and classified by color, material, frequency of use, room, and “what I would save in a fire”. (via @steveportigal.bsky.social) Tags: Barbara Iweins · photography

Teenager Michael Haskell “buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices…with the aim of selling their contents for profit”. But: “Two years into his pursuit, he knows all too well that every locker tells a story, many of them bleak.”

Shoe Pop Dream Gaze, a three-hour playlist from Christina Hendricks’ all-vinyl DJ set. (You may remember Hendricks as Joan on Mad Men.)

We visit Jerry’s Hat Museum, where a retiree has turned to an old chapel to house a collection of thousands of hats, pens, odds, ends and other artifacts from his Illinois hometown.

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jerrys-hat-museum-illinois

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